Data Director

Director of Data | Enterprise Data Transformation High End Luxury Retail | 6 - 12 Month Interim - London | Hybrid We’re partnering with a major global consumer organisation to appoint a Director of Data to lead an enterprise-wide transformation of its data capability. This is a significant leadership mandate with ownership across data strategy, engineering, platforms, governance, data products, BI and analytics enablement. The organisation is investing in creating a more modern, scalable and trusted data ecosystem and needs a leader who can bring structure to the existing landscape, raise engineering and governance standards, and build the operating model required to make data genuinely usable across the business. The opportunity: You will own and execute the enterprise data strategy, leading a broad data organisation spanning: • Data Engineering • Data Platforms • Data Governance & Quality • Data Product Management • BI & Analytics Enablement • Data Operations The initial priority is to stabilise, simplify and centralise the data capability creating clearer ownership, stronger standards and greater reliability before evolving towards a more federated, domain-led operating model. You’ll also own the roadmap for the wider data ecosystem, with Databricks at the heart of the target architecture, alongside Power BI and Looker, while driving the rationalisation of legacy platforms and reporting. Key areas of focusL • Own and evolve the enterprise data strategy and three-year roadmap • Modernise and scale the data platform and engineering environment • Build strong DataOps, observability, quality and governance disciplines • Establish clear enterprise ownership, stewardship, lineage and data standards • Build a mature data product management capability • Accelerate self-service BI and analytics across the organisation • Rationalise legacy platforms, reporting and tooling • Build and develop a high-performing senior data leadership team • Partner with senior business leaders to translate data investment into measurable commercial outcomes • Create the foundations required to support advanced analytics, ML and future AI use cases What we’re looking for We’re looking for an established Director of Data / Head of Data / Enterprise Data Leader who has led meaningful transformation within a large, complex organisation. You’ll ideally bring: • Experience owning enterprise data platforms and engineering at scale • Strong knowledge of modern cloud data environment. Databricks experience would be particularly relevant • A track record of improving data governance, quality, lineage and stewardship • Experience building data product and self-service analytics capabilities • Leadership of sizeable, multidisciplinary data teams • Experience delivering complex, multi-year transformation roadmaps • Strong commercial and executive-level stakeholder management • The credibility to operate strategically while still engaging deeply with architects and engineers Experience within retail, luxury, consumer, digital commerce or another highly complex customer-led environment would be particularly valuable. This is a role for someone who enjoys transformation: building clarity from complexity, creating strong foundations and then turning data into a genuine enterprise capability.